


Bleeds for a Week and Doesn't Die

by Nutkin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Always Female Dean, Always Female Sam, F/F, Femslash, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:06:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nutkin/pseuds/Nutkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Winchester has two daughters named Sam and Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleeds for a Week and Doesn't Die

The last time your sister makes you cry, you're twelve. She got her hands on your diary - like you didn't know keeping one was a bad idea - and teases you mercilessly about Steve, the boy in your class you have a crush on. For a week it's all you hear about, until his name doesn't even sound like a word anymore.

"Oh, Steve," she moans, fake-swooning on the couch, the back of her hand on her forehead. "I love you, Steve!"

You screw your face up in embarrassment, tears prickling, and then you haul off and punch her in the eye. 

She doubles over, clutches at it, and stares at you for almost a full minute - eyebrows drawn together, mouth slack, visible eye watering. 

Then she breaks into a grin.

It's a start.

*

They leave you in motel rooms a lot, or the back seat of the car. In the summer, in the spring, when Dad pulls you both out of school and slums around, she's always covered in bruises. She wears them like she doesn't care, like they're accessories, peeking out from under the sleeves of her t-shirts and the hems of her skirts. People must think she gets in fights, or is knocked around by a lousy boyfriend. 

It would be easy for her to be like a mom, cooking and cleaning and taking care of you, but that's not Dean. She leaves the parenting to Dad and exists like a demonstrative advice column in Glamour or Cosmo - good for tips on tweezing those stray eyebrow hairs, making him yours, and blending colors; bad for help with homework, nutritional meals, or laundry. She's the one who pushes a box of tampons in your hand on the day of your first period, bluntly telling you that pads are never going to happen, not with the gig you guys do, and to never go for aspirin when there's Advil around.

"That shit thins your blood," she says. "You do the math."

She calls you her baby sister when you're in the third person and Sammy when you're in the second. You think maybe it's her way of making your name a boy's one, too, and you acidly correct her every time.

"It's Samantha," you're always saying. "My name is Samantha."

She pretends she can't hear you.

You're a skinny kid, and a skinnier teenager. By junior high you wear size ten shoes, and the only upside to it is that your sneakers are no longer third-hand from Dean, just plain old second-hand. You don't even buy a bra until you're fourteen, and you feel lame wearing it. You spend a lot of time with your arms crossed in front of you, going through the whole eighth grade looking irritated and confrontational.

"You're so _lucky_ ," says your one friend when you're fifteen. She's watching you shovel fries in your mouth at the mall food court. "It's like you never gain a pound." You blush and feel like a freak.

Dean has normal proportions and no real friends. Every now and then she'll hang around someone, and there will be one name or another that crops up a few times in your late-night conversations. For the most part, though, she doesn't seem to have an interest in girls. They're just competition for the things she cares about - clothes, boys, the spotlight. You don't know if you should be offended that she doesn't think of you like that, or glad that she deigns to hang out with you on weekends.

*

Stuff between you starts before you can even think about it objectively. You burrow together under blankets in motel rooms and cold apartments, and it doesn't even seem that surprising that she's your first kiss. It's not like it counts, or anything, because it's the same way she puts her arms around you when you wake up from a bad dream, or shares an ice cream bar with you in the summer. She's still your sister, but you kiss under the covers until you feel so hot inside that the hand working up between your legs is nothing but a comfort.

Eventually it changes, turns into grinding with your clothes off, the barely-there buds of her breasts against your flat chest. It's not much later that she starts screwing around with guys, and you go back to reading the dirty parts of romance novels in the stacks at Goodwill, throbbing in your jeans. 

When you're a sophomore in high school and have graduated to a B-cup, she finds her way back into your ratty pajamas. 

It's a bad year for you - Dad forbids you from wasting your time on team sports, and insists you spend your afternoons at the edge of town, going over weapon techniques. You weather months of slammed doors (yours) and tears (his, in your fantasies where he realizes he's forever lost your love and respect). Dean alternates between storming out of the house and sitting with him at the kitchen table, probably agreeing that you're a horrible person. You join the soccer team with a forged permission slip, and your sister is the good child, mastering the crossbow and keeping her mouth shut. 

You take the bus to school most days, sitting by a window and working your way through Tamora Pierce novels. Dean's got the brains for mechanics, or at least a record store, but winds up waitressing in taverns instead because she gets killer tips.

"Debasing yourself _and_ making untaxable money?" You pull a _Home Alone_ face of feigned shock. "It's your dream profession."

"Eat me," she says, but you're the one who winds up on your back.

She rolls your tall uniform socks down your calves and grips your thighs, thin and smooth and tense with runner's muscles. You can't even think twice about it, because she's just like that - she pushes you too far sometimes, she makes you want things you only think about when lights are off.

"Yeah?" she asks, easing your green shorts down, watching you hawkishly, and you grip your plaid bedspread and nod.

The next day, her big, stupid car is parked outside the high school. She revs the engine twice, and you clutch your books to your chest as you pick your way through the crowd. Someone yanks on your ponytail and you grit your teeth.

"I sure do miss high school boys," she says, watching the baseball team make their way out to practice. You slam the door shut behind you and sink down low in the passenger seat, fingers automatically clicking the seatbelt shut. "The stamina on those things. Twice in one night or your money back."

"You're so gross," you snap, pushing hair out of your eyes. "And you don't have to do this."

"Do what?"

"Be nice to me." You drag your leg up until the heel of your sneaker is on the edge of the seat, and rest your chin against your awkward knee. "Picking me up from school? Come on. That's pretty _sisterly_. You might sprain something."

The look she gives you is totally shuttered, her wide lips pinned together and eyebrows up. She looks hurt and surprised and cold all at once, and suddenly you're the one who feels guilty.

She keeps coming back, though. After school, on weekends, when Dad's not around - she'll be there, with a warm mouth and cool fingers. 

"When are you gonna get a boyfriend?" she asks once, and you shrug away from the arm around your shoulders.

"I don't know," you say, scratching at a mosquito bite. "When are you gonna stop jumping me?"

When the sports season and the school year fade away and you're back on the road, she lets you get your ass handed to you a little out in the woods, because if you had taken the time to work on your bowhunting it wouldn't be a problem. 

"Sorry, Pelé," she says, grabbing your hand and yanking you off the forest floor. "Guess you need some more practice."

The only thing that reigns her is in your father. All he has to do is look at her funny, and she's straightening up, smoothing her hair, squaring her shoulders. Daddy's little girl, while you pick at your food and talk about news articles you read, stuff that no one else cares about. They discuss politics, agreeing with each other about how the country needs the strong hand of a Republican, and you bring up articles about national debt and global warming. It's just another way you're not part of their club of two, just another way in which you care about all the wrong things. 

*

So you go to Stanford and start studying environmental problems until you can't bring yourself to care anymore. You change majors three times. You get a CD collection going of singer/songwriters and jazz. You put salt on your windowsills and stop putting it on your food. You meet a pretty girl with blonde hair in a poetry class. Making out with her is sexier than the actual sex, but it's good. She cooks and reads a lot, and paints your toes while you talk about school work. You get your hair cut in a pageboy, and she tucks it behind your ear, tells you how pretty you are when you aren't hiding behind it.

You eat tabouli salad and think of the road, and if your sister's got herself into anything she can't handle. You magnanimously decide you forgive her for being a huge fuck-up. She's still under Dad's thumb in a big way, but now that you're out here in the world, you realize that maybe you had more of a hand in keeping her in line than you ever thought before. Sometimes you think that maybe she's like you, that she's found a still point in the moving world. Maybe she finally ditched Dad, maybe she met some guy who made her feel like Jessica makes you feel. 

Scenarios are easy to dream up - Dean got pregnant by a trucker and lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Illinois. Dean broke a leg in the south and fell in love with the handsome doctor who set the bone, and now they're planning a June wedding. Dean sold the car and got a motorcycle. Dean's writing a novel in her spare time. Dean's growing up, getting some common sense, shaking off Dad's craziness and her own coping techniques.

And then she shows up in your apartment in the middle of the night, and the only thing that's different is that her smirk is Passion Pink instead of Ruby Red.

"I _was_ looking for a beer."

*

She doesn't think you were really in love, even though she doesn't say so. It's the same as when you got a crush on Tammy, the cheerleader in your AP history class who smelled like Love's Baby Soft, when you were seventeen. The idea that you're a lesbian strikes her as hilarious, because she's not. She could never be.

Jessica dying has to be a kind of litmus test - why would she die if it wasn't love? Mom dying was a fluke, but this is a pattern. Winchesters lose the people they love, and all they get to keep is each other. Except now Dad's gone too, and isn't that just fucking awesome.

She's not glad it happened. It's inconceivable to think so - she's still your big sister, and she looks at you sometimes like you're breakable, like she's waiting for you to officially go over the edge. You ignore it, you focus on hunting, you keep your Jess-approved pageboy pulled back in a ponytail, short and blunt and with bits falling down when you take a fall.

She's not glad it happened, but you can tell she's glad you're back. 

"I can't believe you still listen to that shit," she says, pulling your iPod out of your hands and sneering down at the screen. "It's gonna give you brain cancer."

"It is not," you snap, yanking it back.

"Oh, it totally is. I read this article about it in Wannabe Dyke magazine."

You roll your eyes, because four years away has given you just enough perspective to be unimpressed.

She does stupid stuff to piss you off or make you laugh. She tunes in pop radio and sings along with life-affirming girl music, making atonal noises that vaguely sound like the lyrics while Vanessa Carlton or whoever pours her heart out. She buys you the kind of candy you liked when you were a kid, and you're glad for it, glad to shut out the four years of trying to be someone else. 

Bad food, bad music, bad dreams. This is your life now, and she helps you make the best of it.

At night she takes you to bars, like she forgot that's what she thinks is fun, not you. You stare at your beer all night while she flirts with three guys from a construction crew, or two brothers from Racine.

She loves the part where she gets to be someone else, puts on a costume and uses a different name. She's Tiffany the hairstylist in Boise, Roseanna the newscaster in Buffalo. She'll wear her hair up in a bun and talk about her class of third graders, or put on a skirt and talk about her portfolio. When anyone asks a question she can't answer, she pretends her beer went down the wrong pipe, or loudly offers to buy everyone shots.

"It's like you get off on lying to people," you say.

"Yeah, 'cause 'I've got a dude's name and hunt evil,' is such an ice-breaker," she says. "I'm not lookin' for Mr. Right, Sammy. I'm looking for Mr. I'm Here, I'm Hung and I'm Buying Your Drinks For the Night."

"Inspirational."

"It is," she says, lipping her beer bottle. "It is."

*

She comes in one night when you've just woken up from a nightmare, and just stares at you, sitting up in bed and covered in sweat. Your hair's a tangle around your face, and you know you look like a mess when she sits next to you.

"C'mere," she says, folding you into an awkward hug. She's warm and smells like other people's cigarettes, and you're still shaking from visions of Jess - alive, breathing, bleeding - when she strokes your hair.

"Dean," you whisper.

"It's okay, Sammy. I got you." Her mouth finds yours, close-lipped and soothing. It tastes bitterly of beer and sweetly of strawberry lip gloss, and when you push your tongue in, when you drag her down against the lumpy motel pillows, you're not thinking about Jessica. You're not thinking about anything at all.

" _Dean_ ," you say again, just to hear it, fingers fumbling with the buttons on her shirt. She shoves them away and pulls it open easily, pressing her warm body heat and satiny bra against your t-shirt. 

You're not sixteen anymore, but it doesn't really matter. You love her like you've always loved her, because she's beautiful and loud and irritating - and even though she's smaller than you, you fit into her like _the baby_ again.

She's still the same, with freckles on her chest and cheekbones, that pointy nose dragging down your stomach and making you gasp and go wet. She's got a leg holster under her skirt and boy-cut panties with lace around the edges, and you laugh because you wouldn't expect anything else from someone who grew up wanting to be one of Charlie's angels. 

She still hasn't told you if she ever did this - does this - with other girls, you but you wouldn't be surprised if this is just another one of those things she always gets right on the first try. She bites the inside of your thigh and holds you open so she can lick your clit.

It's a slow road, but she gets you there every time.

*

You hunt a spirit in Connecticut as Dr. Eden and Dr. Montgomery. You stand shoulder to shoulder in power suits, Dean with red lipstick and you with no make-up at all. She leans over the counter and flirts with the security guard, tapping the tip of her pump against the floor and smiling widely until he waves the both of you through.

"He was old enough to be your _father_ ," you hiss, shoving her with your elbow in the elevator.

"God, will you lighten up?" She rubs at her arm through the black material of the jacket. "So I flirted with the guy. Stop acting like I dropped to my knees right in the freakin' lobby."

You fold your arms and shake your head, like you're fourteen again.

The elevator dings as you go past the third floor, and she jabs the emergency stop button and pushes you against the cold metal wall. He fingers get up under your skirt before you can think, twisting where you're wet and hot and ready. 

"Been thinkin' about me?" she laughs, sliding two fingers in. You clench around them without even trying, and she brushes her lips against that spot behind your ear that makes you shiver.

*

"Sammy," she says, glancing over at you from the driver's seat. Her hair's been pulled back in two pigtails, the tips brushing her freckled shoulders. "I mean this in the least Joan Rivers way possible, but you are lettin' yourself go."

"Fuck off." You roll up your window and shake out your own hair. It's getting longer now, darker at the roots where the California sun hasn't bleached it into a warmer brown.

"I'm serious, man," she says. "Let's leave the pasty skin and dark circles to the angry spirits." 

You flip her off. 

In the next town, she pulls you into the drug store. You're holding a scribbled shopping list with Neosporin and Advil on it, and she steers you towards the racks of CoverGirl and cheap plastic jewelry. 

"Seriously?" You turn to look at her in the white sunglasses she hands you, the tag dangling down against your nose. "They're white, dude. I look like a five-year-old."

"God, do you even read the Cosmos I get you? Those aren't just for the articles, dumbass." She tries on a pair, too, and raises her eyebrows at you over them. Rhinestones twinkle in the corners, like an afterthought. "Britney, Lindsay and Paris are all wearing 'em."

You leave with a tube of mascara, a jar of concealer, and five lipsticks she produces from her pocket in the parking lot.

"No one told me this was a very special episode," you say, snatching them out of her hand and throwing them into your bag. She grins.

After Jessica, it's hard to want to be pretty anymore. It feels like you're putting yourself on the market again, asking people to notice you. You start slow - covering up the smudges of darkness under your eyes first, and graduating to swipes of the mascara wand.

"Attagirl," she says from the other bed, filing her nails.

*

You go to Michigan and you don't find Dad. You got to Illinois and you don't find Dad. You go to Florida, and you don't find Dad.

The same kind of fantasies come that you once had about Dean, but this time you know they're not true. She's got a fighting chance of living a real life, but that's not in the cards for him - never was, never will be. He's just out there on another hunt, five steps ahead of you and not looking back. You don't forgive him for being a huge fuck-up; the bitterness is still too fresh.

You might be starting to forgive yourself.

In Ohio you see Jessica on a street corner, wind whipping through that bland white nightgown like she's not even real. For one bright instant, the memory of smoke and fire is sharp, and then it - then she - fades away. Maybe she forgives you, too. Maybe she's even happy for you, now that you've found some way to put yourself back together. You've salted and burned too many things to not believe in something better, and if Jess has that, she'd want it for you, too.

Out on the interstate, Dean fast-forwards through songs you like and turns up ones you don't, and can't bother to look chagrined. You slide your boring black sunglasses down over your eyes. 

"Slut."

"Whore," she says cheerfully, turning up the stereo even further. It's the same old tapes, the same old Dean, and wind from the open window blows her ponytail around when she grins at you.

Yeah, it's a start.

 

-fin.


End file.
